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Stavros Maria Rafael Ibiá became Kav Ibiá a ship’s week later before the towering glass cylinders of Eles-Nol.
The vast glowing hall was nearly empty. Most of the population was too busy preparing for the dawn Planting to attend the ceremony, but the PriestGuild had been temporarily excused from those duties and Susannah was there with Megan and the others, Danforth having laboriously negotiated the long spiral stairs for his first viewing of DulElesi’s major monument to the ancient technology.
They watched Ashimmel robe the new priest in embroidered white as he swore loyalty to his guild. Then he knelt to receive from her scarred hands the silvery lump of guar, the pure lithium mined deep in the rock. His face tightened only slightly as the guar dropped into his palms. He rose and advanced the short, agonizing distance to the central cylinder. As a PriestGuild elder drew open a tiny square panel, Kav Ibiá deposited the guar within.
When he returned across the arched wooden bridgeway, his eyes alight, the Master Healer stepped forward with herbal salve for his burns.
“No miracle to worry you this time, GuildMaster.” Stavros smiled through the pain in his damaged palms. “Clausen was right. The old man tricked us. There was no guar at the leavetaking. Only the Sisters.”
Ghirra was gaunt from his mourning, but his long face was calm. His touch was a feather weight, spreading the cooling salve. He said with quiet disapproval, “These Sisters do not know you do this for them, Ibi.”
“Not for Them, Ghirra.” Stavros nodded behind him, into the waiting ranks of the PriestGuild. “For them. It may take some time,” he promised, “but I will end the guar ritual. For now, it’s a needed metaphor for a more natural connection to the Sisters which every Sawl once had, and someday, will have again. Science, Ghirra, to replace the miracle…”
Ghirra smiled gravely. “I will tell Xifa this promise, so she will know it when I am gone.”
“Yes, and so she’ll hold me to it.”
When dawn came again, Kav Ibiá’s first duty as Ritual Master was to welcome his own designated apprentice to full membership in the guild. As the guildsmen chanted, the newly elected Master Healer stood ready to ease with her skilled hands the young man’s painful passage into priesthood.
But as the guar ate into his willing, virgin palm, Liphar showed little awareness of pain. He thought only of his Ritual Master’s loving, encouraging touch, and of the solemn privilege that it was to feed the Goddesses.
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They made love a final time. The weeks between had made her leaving harder for them both.
“Did it occur to you to stay?” he asked her.
“Did it occur to you to ask?” she replied.
Stavros ran smooth-scarred palms along her back, aching for her already. “I’m hoping that when you’re done rediscovering the universe through Ghirra’s eyes, you’ll both be back.”
Susannah calculated the years and distances involved. Given the explosive nature of the data they would bring to Earth, a return expedition was likely. Many of them, in fact. “Perhaps we will. Or perhaps I will.”
And then she added, “We have yet to prove that we can even leave…”
But mere hours later, Stavros stood at the top of the cliff among his guildsmen and others to see the bright fire ignite at the Lander’s base. The cliff rock shook as engines lain idle for four months coughed dry mud and woke. The tall russet stalks in the surrounding fields bent low in the heat gale. The tilted cone vibrated and lifted, so gradually that his every muscle tensed with the effort of urging the silver craft to flight.
The tilt righted. The cone did not fall back in a whiteout of flame. Slowly, stubbornly, it crawled up out of the gravity well, gaining speed until it was a shining bird-speck climbing the hard malachite sky.
And then it was gone.
Stavros fought the urge to cry out after it, after them, his departing colleagues, after her, whom he loved, but not so much as the new life that had claimed him.
Liphar touched his arm in concern, and Master Healer Xifa offered a face of gentle sympathy. But as the smoke billows cleared and the roar of engines faded into lonely silence, Kav Ashimmel rubbed her scarred hands together like a busy merchant and started briskly toward the cliff stair. On the wide top step, she glanced back at Stavros expectantly as if to say, “Well, my young upstart? Isn’t there work to be done?”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
M. BRADLEY KELLOGG lives in New York City and designs scenery for the theatre. Her first novel, A Rumor of Angels, was published by Signet in 1983. The Wave and the Flame, Part 1 of Lear’s Daughters, was published in 1986.
WILLIAM B. ROSSOW is a space scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, studying planetary atmospheres and climate. He lives in New York City with Lynne Kemen and their two cats.
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